I’d appreciate advice and comments on this intended scenario for a dual boot system.

My current XP x64 system has been reduced to a very small part of the available drive capacity, in anticipation of the installation of OpenSuse 10.1. The system has 4 Seagate 300Gb SATA2 drives, but XP now only needs 80 Gb and the rest has been freed up for Linux.
Unfortunately I can’t wipe XP completely at the moment as some applications I need may not run under Linux without some fine-tuning – but as soon as that can be remedied, it will be goodbye M$

In the 10.1 installation program I intend to define the following partitioning scenario:

sda (= BIOS drive SATA-3)
sda1 – 20 Gb Windows XP (backup of sdc1)
sda2 – 20 Gb Windows XP data
sda3 – 260 Gb extended partition
sda5 – 512 Mb swap
sda6 – 259.5 Gb raid5

sdb (= BIOS drive SATA-4)
sdb1 – 40 Gb mounted as /
sdb2 – 260 Gb extended partition
sdb5 – 512 Mb swap
sdb6 – 259.5 Gb raid5

sdc (= BIOS drive SATA-1)
sdc1 – 20 Gb Windows XP system
sdc2 – 20 Gb Windows XP (backup of sda2)
sdc3 – 260 Gb extended partition
sdc5 – 512 Mb swap
sdc6 – 259.5 Gb raid5

sdd (= BIOS drive SATA-2)
sdd1 – 40 Gb, to be used as backup of sdb1
sdd2 – 260 Gb extended partition
sdd5 – 512 Mb swap
sdd6 – 259.5 Gb raid5

And now, for the questions – advice and comments are very welcome!

Question 1 – Is it possible to define a raid1 array, consisting of sdb1 and sdd1, and to mount / on this array?
It would be nice to have a mirror of the system partition, but I’m not sure if GRUB and/or LILO can boot from arrays.

Question 2 – Is it possible to define a raid0 array, consisting of sda5, sdb5, sdc5, and sdd5, and to use this array as swap?

Question 3 – Is it feasible to define LVM on the raid5 array consisting of sda6, sdb6, sdc6, and sdd6?
As far as I can see, the installation program accepts LVM being defined on this array but specification of volume groups and logical volumes seems restricted. Maybe this is better done later, when the system is up and running?

Question 4 – Which boot loader to use, and where to put it? The BIOS boot order for the drives is now: SATA-1, SATA-2, SATA-3, SATA-4; does this need changing?

And finally - anything else I should be aware of?

Thanks in advance
Eric

1. Grub would be on the MBR of sda, not on sda1
2. Not sure, but 2G of swap is overkill. Way overkill. Try 512M... maybe 1G if you have less than 1G physical RAM. I have not used swap _ever_ on my system with 1.5G physical memory.
3. I can't help here
4. Use grub. Install on sda

I always try to have SWAP or page files much sooner on HD, access is already slow, why cut speed in half by designating so late in partitions?
What R your HW specs? Keep hearing SWAP not used, slows down performance, etc, but Suse default 2GB, & Mdv 07 wanted 4GB (aka 2xRAM)
You may want to retry when 10.2 in beta or Final!